Francis Walsingham’s zealousness can perhaps be explained by looking at his early career and particularly the time he spent in exile during the reign of Mary Tudor. A year of that time (1555-6) was spent at the University of Padua and this period bears investigation.
Padua, an inland city of the Venetian Republic, was surrounded by impressive ramparts which had been built following the War of the League of Cambrai when the city had briefly fallen to Imperial (Holy Roman) forces backed by France, Castile and the Papacy (the full set of Catholic powers as it were). Arriving just a generation later, Walsingham would have sensed that the citizens had a feeling of being under siege and that threats from the Holy Roman Empire and/or France could arise at any moment. Not only that, but the Venetian Republic also faced growing pressure on its eastern borders from the expanding Ottoman Empire which in the 16th Century was becoming more successful at naval warfare. As long as the Ottoman Empire had remained a land-based, military power then the Venetians had been confident in their dealings with it even to the extent of basically ignoring it and continuing to trade with Greece, the Levant, Constantinople and thru to the Black Sea. Now, however, Venetian pre-eminence at sea was no longer assured and the Republic felt threatened on 2 fronts.
(Drawing by Canaletto of Padua and its ramparts which had been constructed 2 centuries earlier and which would have been brand new when Walsingham arrived in 1555.)
The Padua which Walsingham spent time in therefore would have been nominally ‘catholic’ but would also have been deeply distrustful, if not resentful, of its treatment by the Papacy and the other Catholic powers. And during Walsingham’s year in Padua, 2 significant news events would reach him and his fellow students in the faculty of law which would have had a profound impact upon them.
Firstly, in September 1555 the Peace of Augsburg between the Holy Roman Empire and the Schmalkaldic League brought an end to the sectional war in Germany but enshrined sectarian rule in doing so. The principle of
cuius regio, eius religio ‘in whose realm, goes his religion’ was a victory for Protestantism in that it put it on a equal footing with Catholicism in law, but was a set-back for individual freedom in that the concept of religious conformity was established as the ideal set-up for each state. In short, if your ruler shared your religion and you liked it that way, then you’d better make sure that someone of the other side didn’t succeed in their place. This would have been quite depressing for a protestant exile such as Walsingham with the catholic Mary Tudor on the throne in England.
Walsingham’s depression would have been turned to outrage, however, by the second major news story to reach him in Padua which came 6 months later. This was in March 1556 with the news from England that the aged protestant Archbishop Thomas Cranmer had been tried and burned at the stake for heresy despite having recanted. This was seemingly at odds with canon law but the Papacy had already washed its hands of Cranmer on an ecclesiastical level and had handed his fate over to the temporal authorities. One can well imagine that the 23-year-old student in Padua along with his fellows would have been seething at the injustice of this. Walsingham and Cranmer were also both Cambridge alumni and with the trial and execution having taken place in Oxford, this may well have compounded his feelings. The story of Cranmer’s last-minute, scaffold-retraction of his recantation and his refutation of the pope would, perhaps, have provided some comfort to Walsingham. But, lawyer or not, in the debate of Catholicism v Protestantism, who he saw as being ‘the goodies’ and who ‘the baddies’ would likely to have been set and hardened in Walsingham’s mind around this time.
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